Timothy of Prusa
The Holy Hieromartyr Timothy, Bishop of Prusa, the Wonderworker
Hieromartyr · Bishop · Wonderworker · d. c. 362
Commemorated 10 June — Beheading at Prusa under Julian the Apostate
Timothy was bishop of Prusa in Bithynia (the modern Bursa) in the middle of the fourth century, honoured by the synaxaria as a wonderworker whose gift of miracles was ascribed to the purity of his life. He converted a great part of the still-pagan population of his city, and the tradition remembers him above all for destroying a dragon that had made the road between Prusa and its famous hot springs impassable. When the apostate emperor Julian learned of the miracle and of the bishop's success in preaching Christ, he had him imprisoned; Timothy went on teaching from his cell, and about the year 362 was beheaded by the emperor's order. His relics were afterwards carried to Constantinople, where a church was dedicated to him.
Bishop of Prusa in Bithynia
Prusa lay at the foot of Mount Olympus of Bithynia, a city of Roman baths and thermal springs whose religious life was still substantially pagan when Timothy received its see. Nothing certain survives of his origins; the synaxarion notice concerns itself entirely with his episcopate, and presents him as a hierarch whose ascetic purity was the ground of a charism of wonderworking — a formula the Byzantine notices use sparingly and which fixed for Timothy the standing epithet θαυματουργός, "wonderworker." Under his teaching, the notices say, many of the pagans of Prusa and its territory came to the faith, so that the city's conversion was in large measure his work.
The dragon of the hot springs
The one narrative episode the tradition preserves in detail belongs to the year 361. Between the city and the thermal springs, on the road the sick took to the waters, a great serpent (the notices call it a dragon) had made its lair; its venom poisoned the air of the place, and the road became impassable. The account has Timothy travelling that way, carrying with him the consecrated Gifts — sent, in one version of the story, to a Christian empress. Coming upon the beast, he wrapped the Gifts in his epitrachelion, cast the stole at the creature, and went on his way without turning aside. Returning by the same road, he found the dragon dead, and gave glory to God.
The episode is of a type common in the hagiography of the Anatolian and Balkan hierarchs, where the destruction of a serpent stands for the ending of a pagan cult at a spring or grove; at Prusa, a city whose waters had their own religious associations, the shape of the story is particularly apt. The tradition, however, transmits it as an event, and it is this miracle that the notices name as the immediate cause of the bishop's arrest.
Julian, imprisonment, and martyrdom
Julian the Apostate (361–363) came to sole power in the very year of the miracle, and set about restoring the temples and rolling back the Church's advance without, in most places, the formal machinery of persecution. Report of the wonder at Prusa, and of the numbers Timothy was drawing to Christ, reached the emperor. Timothy was arrested and imprisoned, and — the notices are precise on this point — was ordered not to put an end to his life but to put an end to his teaching: he was forbidden to speak of Jesus Christ. He continued from prison to preach, confess, and instruct those who came to him. An imperial officer was sent to demand that he renounce Christ; when he refused, sentence was passed, and he was beheaded, about the year 362.
Relics and cultus
His relics were afterwards translated to Constantinople. The Byzantine notices record a church of St Timothy attached to a hospital of the capital, "in the Second" — that is, in the second region or quarter — and it is there that his memory was chiefly kept in the imperial city. In Bithynia his commemoration remained local and firm, and passed from the Constantinopolitan synaxaria into the printed Greek menaia, the Slavonic Prologue, and so into universal Orthodox use on June 10.
Feast and commemoration
June 10 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 23). Timothy is the principal commemoration of the day in the Greek and the Slavonic books alike, and stands first in the day's notices in the Antiochian usage as in the others. The Greek menaion styles him "hieromartyr and wonderworker"; the Slavonic books commemorate him simply as hieromartyr, bishop of Prusa. In the Russian calendar his memory shares the day with the Finding of the Relics of Basil of Ryazan, the Kiev-Caves ascetic Silvanus, and John of Tobolsk, so that Timothy's proper is often sung together with a Russian local service.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hieromartyr)
As a sharer in the ways and a successor to the throne of the Apostles, O divinely-inspired one, thou didst find in the practice of virtue the way of ascent to contemplation; rightly dividing the word of truth, thou didst contend for the faith even unto blood, O hieromartyr Timothy: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Kontakion — Tone 4 (common of a hieromartyr)
Having shone forth in Bithynia as a lamp of the priesthood, thou didst quench the venom of the serpent by thy prayer and the malice of the tyrant by thy blood, O wise Timothy; wherefore, as a wonderworker and a martyr, thou pourest healing upon those who honour thee.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Timothy is painted as a hierarch of middle age or elderly, in phelonion and crossed omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the Gospel-book in the left, with the martyr's inscription Ο ΑΓΙΟΣ ΤΙΜΟΘΕΟΣ ΕΠΙΣΚΟΠΟΣ ΠΡΟΥΣΗΣ; where the tradition of the dragon is shown, the serpent is coiled beneath his feet or in a lower register of the panel, sometimes with the stole cast upon it, and the scene of his beheading may stand opposite. In the Russian menaion icons of the month of June he appears in the first register of the tenth day, vested as a bishop among the day's saints. No pre-1900 icon of Timothy alone has been located for this collection: a Wikimedia Commons search under the Greek, English and Russian forms of his name returns only composite seventeenth-century menaion panels for the whole month of June, in which the individual figure cannot be identified with certainty from the available reproductions, and no single-saint image at all.
Disputed questions
- Not to be confused with the Apostle Timothy, disciple of St Paul and first bishop of Ephesus (January 22), nor with Timothy of Antioch or the several martyr-Timothies of the Diocletianic persecutions. This Timothy is a fourth-century Bithynian hierarch of the reign of Julian, not an apostolic-age figure; the coincidence of a famous name with an Asia Minor see makes the confusion easy.
- The year of martyrdom is given as 362 in most notices, on the strength of the reference to Julian's sole reign; some sources say simply "under Julian" (361–363), and the precise year is an inference.
- The dragon. Some modern retellings soften the beast into a plague or a poisonous vapour at the springs. The Greek synaxarion text speaks of a δράκων, and the earliest form of the notice keeps the creature; the softening is a modern rationalisation and is not part of the transmitted account.
- The Gifts and the empress. The detail that Timothy was carrying the Holy Gifts to a Christian empress is transmitted unevenly and no empress is named; under Julian, an Orthodox empress in Bithynia is difficult to place, and the detail is best treated as a secondary embellishment of the core miracle.